Ok, so this is weird. The assembly manual tells you to refer to drawing #40 for the correct placement of the cabin frame attach brackets...but drawing #40 really tells you squat about where to put it. Well, actually they give you a measurement from underneath the seat back brace. I have no idea why they do that. I guess the drawing is made during design and not during development of the kit. Whatever.

Anyway...you can sort of infer from the drawing that the forward face of the rollbar sits flush with the top skin..so that's what I did. I clecoed the skin on and came up with a location that made sense.

Here's another shot for the 'big picture'.

After literally procrastinating for a couple of hours on this I finally decided to just bite my lip and drill these things. It really wasn't that big of a deal once I did it. My advise to builders here would definately be to start with a smaller bit and work your way up. You can sort of see in this drawing how the aft end of the bracket overhangs the side skin a little bit. The plans have you do this intentionally then file down the bracket to match the contour of the skin.

So that's what I did.

One thing I'm not at all happy about is the fit of this thing. Yeah, this picture is before I actually bolted the brackets down...but you can sort of see how the lower edge of the roll bar does not line up laterally with the fuselage. The left side is the same way. Hmm....the height measure at the center of the fuselage is exactly the height the plans call for, so it's not like I can juust trim this thing off and let it be. I suppose I could file it even but keep the center height the same. Decisions, decisions...

Also, I can't find a part. I got caught up in the middle of a slight change to the kit and it looks like Van's shorted me a part that I missed origionally. It wasn't on my packing slip, but the plans say I should have it. Whatever...it's too long a story to post here...but I"m definately going to post to the Vansairforce forums to see what's up.

Since I can't continue with the missing part and I'm waiting on a response from the forums, I thought I would go ahead and mess with this channel. As I mentioned in an earlier post, per the plans this thing is just open. I cut a sheet to close up the gap and measured out some fastener locations and drilled it to the channel. I'm most likely going to run my headset wires through this thing and maybe put some sort of overhead light for the baggage area. The headset jacks will probably be toward the forward end, one set on each side of the channel. The only caveat to this position is loading/unloading the baggage area, but the seat belts area already a nuisance when doing this so I don't really see how the headset wires add that much of a problem. I can always clamp them out of the way a bit. Oh yeah, the only over caveat is the weight of the long cable run. I thought about running them through the roll bar, but that would mean putting holes (and weak points) in the structure.